The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, whose three members have all come under fire for documented antisemitic statements, issued its “legal analysis” of genocide claims in Gaza.
The U.N. commission’s new report, which it issued on Tuesday, “finds that the Israeli security forces were aware that their military operations since Oct. 7, 2023, would cause the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza.”
“Furthermore, considering the duration of the military operations and reports of high numbers of deaths, it is reasonable to find that the Israeli authorities knew of the high numbers of casualties in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023,” the report says. “Nevertheless, Israeli authorities did not intervene to change the means and methods of warfare employed.”
The report accuses the Israeli military of continuing its operations and causing “even more Palestinian deaths.”
“The commission therefore finds that the Israeli authorities intended to kill as many Palestinians as possible through its military operations in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, and knew that the means and methods of warfare employed would cause mass deaths of Palestinians, including children,” it states.
UN Watch said that the commission “never acknowledges that the IDF is engaged in combat with an estimated 30,000-strong Hamas force in Gaza, as well as thousands of fighters from other militant groups.”
“A reader would come away believing the war has the IDF deployed against only women and children, with Hamas erased from the narrative,” the nonprofit stated.
The first mention of Hamas in the report comes on page eight.
The commission accuses Israel of killing a large number of civilians, using Israeli statistics that it had killed 8,900 terrorists. That figure is the number of terrorists that Israel can identify by name, but not a full tally of the number of combatants it has killed.
The report also states that “Israel launched its military offensive in Gaza” on Oct. 7, 2023. It does not mention that Israel launched a defensive war based on the Hamas-led terror attacks in the southern part of the Jewish state earlier that day.
“There is no mention of Hamas’s 17-year military buildup in Gaza,” UN Watch stated. It adds that the commission “ignores Hamas’s openly acknowledged human shield strategy” and “omits the fact that Hamas took Israeli hostages and continues to hold them, starve them and rape them.”
In its report, the commission stated that Israel intended to kill Palestinian civilians, since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Oct. 7 that the Jewish state would take “mighty vengeance” on “all of the places which Hamas is deployed, hiding and operating in, that wicked city. We will turn them into rubble.”
“Although Netanyahu’s statement carefully directed the call for vengeance at ‘Hamas locations,’ his use of the phrase ‘wicked city’ in the same statement implied that he saw the whole city of Gaza as responsible and a target for vengeance,” the panel said.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry said the report is “distorted and false” and that members of the commission are “Hamas proxies.”
“The report relies entirely on Hamas falsehoods, laundered and repeated by others,” the ministry stated. “These fabrications have already been thoroughly debunked.”
B’nai B’rith International stated that the “expressly prejudiced” commission “was established and populated by the openly prejudiced Human Rights Council, which systematically targets Israel more than all of the world’s most atrocious human rights abusers combined.”
“Predictably, the commission parrots the propaganda libel that the democratic Jewish state commits ‘genocide,’” B’nai B’rith stated. “This big lie will undermine the global human rights system more than it tarnishes Israel, but we will combat it unceasingly.”
“Israel, which has shown more care for civilians exploited as human shields by its relentless enemies than any party to any war, will justly fight to protect its own civilians’ lives, and it will survive adversaries’ shameless defamation,” it added.
